42 (number) - Technology

Technology

• Magic numbers used by programmers:
  • The glyph, or character, corresponding to the number 42 in the ASCII character set, is *, the asterisk, commonly known as the wildcard character.
  • In the TIFF image file format, the second 16-bit word of every file is 42, which is used together with the first word to indicate byte order.
  • In the reiser4 file system, 42 is the inode number of the root directory.
  • In the military IRIG 106 Chapter 10 data recording standard, the hex value 0x464F52545974776F (ASCII "FORTYtwo") is used as a magic number to identify directory blocks.
• The GNU C Library, a set of standard routines available for use in computer programming, contains a function—memfrob—which performs an XOR combination of a given variable and the binary pattern 00101010 (42) as an XOR cipher.
• 42 is the result given by the web search engines Google and Wolfram Alpha when the query "the answer to life the universe and everything" is entered as a search.
• Tiling a plane using regular hexagons, which is honeycomb in appearance, is approximated in a topological sense to an accuracy of better than 1% using a stretcher bond brick pattern with bricks of 42 squares (6 by 7).